Communication

We therapists often advise our clients to ignore or reject the inner critic. That’s a little like trying to ignore a pebble in our shoe. What if we can do something productive, like removing the pebble from our shoe? Ignoring it just doesn’t work. What if we were to actually listen to and befriend the inner critic instead of ignoring it?

My meditation practice has helped me separate myself from my inner critic. Through increased awareness, I started to pay attention to that loud voice, rather than it simply being background noise. In fact, I named my inner critic “Bertha.” I have usually told her to go away when her voice gets loud. Nonetheless, in times of stress, Bertha comes around more often, and telling “her” to go away just makes her voice louder. It’s like that pebble in a shoe that gets more and more irritating until we do something about it.

Be Grateful to Everyone

Befriending my inner critic has been a transformative and empowering experience. It started with asking myself: What if Bertha is trying to be helpful but just doesn’t know how to communicate kindly and skillfully?

I am reminded of the Tibetan Buddhist mind-training slogan[a]: “Be Grateful to Everyone.” In her seminal book, Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living,[b] Pema Chodron notes that this mind-training slogan is about making peace with the aspects of ourselves we have rejected. When we meet someone who pushes our buttons, instead of pushing them away, this slogan teaches us to welcome them in, knowing that they are triggering a part of ourselves we don’t like. Tibetan Buddhist teacher Traleg Rinpoche notes:

If we can shift our focus from our rigid, narrow and habituated points of view, we will empower our ability to embrace situations in a new way so that every situation will start to seem more workable….We should endeavor to think good thoughts about people who have…made our lives quite difficult at time and try to turn those negative situations to our spiritual advantage, so that we become wiser and stronger.[c]

Of course, Bertha is not a real person, but I find this teaching very helpful in working with that part of me that is self-critical. As a result, I have started listening to my inner critic with compassion and curiosity, like I would with a young child who doesn’t yet have the skills to express her needs. Instead of immediately rejecting Bertha, I have started exploring what she is trying to communicate. For example, if Bertha reproaches me for being forgetful or clumsy when I’m stressed out, I can thank her for encouraging me to slow down and take a breath. Befriending my inner critic has helped me embrace parts of myself I have rejected, in a way that empowers me rather than causing harm. I can then actually be grateful to Bertha, for reminding me to be self-compassionate.

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[a] There are 59 slogans for training the mind to cultivate lovingkindness and wisdom, as a way to bring the Buddhist teachings into everyday life. The Tibetan term is “lojong”, which means mind-training, or heart-training.

Digital distraction is everywhere these days. I have started paying attention to how I also use my devices to avoid difficult emotions. Checking my emails and surfing the internet consume more hours in my day than I’d like to admit. So, I have started looking more mindfully at my digital device habits.

How We Use Our Devices to Avoid Difficult Emotions

I have noticed that when watching the horrific news of the day, I often pick up my tablet to play a game of Solitaire. With this mindful view, I now understand that I often play Solitaire to avoid feeling anxious and worried.

Similarly, when I’m taking public transportation, I tend to fritter away my time on my cellphone. As a result, I miss human interactions and the beautiful scenery around me. I see how digital distraction distances us from others, and from our environment.

I have been weighing whether my digital device use truly connects me to others. Many close friends and family members prefer to “talk” via text, rather than by phone or in person. I have picked up this habit as well. I believe that much of the divisiveness, violence, confusion and lack of empathy in today’s world can be attributed to an over-reliance on social media for connection.

Digital Distraction As a Defense Against Being Hurt

Many of the clients in my therapy practice admit that they surf the internet to avoid difficult emotions, such as anger, fear or anxiety. For example, “Donna” has a history of complex trauma, primarily due to her mother’s emotional abuse. As a result, Donna has used distraction as a coping mechanism throughout her life to avoid painful emotions.

Donna told me that she has long been “disconnected from life” to avoid anxiety and fear. She worries that if she connects with those in her life, they will disappoint and hurt her, like her mother did. Likewise, Donna avoids connecting with herself because when she does she is filled with negative self-judgments.

Due to her anxiety and fears, Donna often stays up until 2am or later, surfing the internet and playing computer games. She understands that this habit allows her to avoid her fears and other difficult emotions.

How The Emotional Rescue 3-Step Plan Can Help Create Healthy Relationships with Our Devices…And With Others

Donna and I have been working with the book Emotional Rescue: How to Work with Your Emotions to Transform Hurt and Confusion into Energy that Empowers Youby Dzogchen Ponlop[i]. We recently applied Ponlop Rinpoche’s Emotional Rescue 3-Step Plan to Donna’s digital distraction as a way to avoid feeling her emotions at bedtime. As a result, Donna is beginning to let go of her digital device urge, and instead, has begun reading or knitting to help her relax into sleep.

I offer the Emotional Rescue 3-Step Plan here to help you create a mindful and healthy relationship with your devices and understand the triggers that make you turn to them to avoid difficult emotions.

The first step of the Emotional Rescue 3-Step Plan is Mindful Gap. When you feel the urge to distract yourself with your devices, simply stop, take a breath and notice the urge without taking action. Breathe and feel what’s going on in your body without judgment.

From this internal focus, expand your awareness to your environment. This is Clear Seeing, the second step of the Emotional Rescue Plan. Take a look and see what your body is telling you when you have the urge to digitally distract yourself. For example, do you feel a fluttering in your chest or tightening in your stomach when you feel anxious? Do you start fidgeting when you’re bored? Is there a pattern to mindlessly picking up a device when you feel certain emotions?

The third step of the Emotional Rescue 3-Step Plan is Letting Go. Allow your body to relax. Breathe in compassion for yourself, and breathe out compassion for all others who feel the need to digitally distract themselves to avoid difficult emotions.

Letting go gives you the chance to choose whether or not to pick up a device at that moment. My aspiration is to choose connection and aliveness over distraction and numbness.

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[i]Dzogchen Ponlop (2016). Emotional Rescue: How to Work with Your Emotions to Transform Hurt and Confusion into Energy that Empowers You. New York: Tarchin/Perigree.

“Do your best to practice compassionate listening. Do not listen for the sole purpose of judging, criticizing or analyzing. Listen only to help the other person express himself and find some relief from suffering.” Thich Nhat Hanh

Mindful listening is so important in times of trauma and grief, so prevalent in our world today. Mindful listening, also called active or compassionate listening, is about connection and validation. When we feel heard, we feel loved, cared for and understood, just as we are.

We may think that it is easy to listen, but true listening from the heart requires openness, courage and vulnerability. Mindful listening helps us stay open with another and be able to sit with the expression of intense emotions. Mindful listening is active listening. We do not passively sit there, but convey to the speaker that he or she is heard and understood, whether by paraphrasing, reflection or nonverbal acts, like sitting forward in your chair, maintaining eye contact, and nodding our head. Roshi Joan Halifax beautifully expresses this as follows:

Listening means that we have stabilized our minds so completely that the person who is speaking can actually hear themselves through our stillness.It is a quality of radiant listening, of luminous listening, of vibrant listening, but it is also very still. It is listening with attention, with openheartedness, without prejudice….We listen with our being. We offer our whole listening body.[i]

Listening is not about giving advice, trying to fix the situation or agreeing with the speaker. What the person who is suffering needs most is someone to compassionately bear witness to what he or she is feeling. Mindful listening requires empathy, not sympathy. As shame and trauma researcher and writer Brené Brown has said,

“Empathy fuels connection while sympathy drives disconnection…. Empathy entails the “ability to take the perspective of another person or recognize their perspective as their truth…. Empathy is I’m feeling with you. Sympathy [is] I’m feeling for you.”[ii]

Suffering is a universal part of the human condition. However, despite the universality of suffering, we are unique individuals, and our suffering has unique qualities. Therefore, responding “I know just how you feel” (i.e., “feeling for you”) is unhelpful and even hurtful. If you identify so completely with another’s suffering, you no longer hear him or her as an individual. Instead of saying “I know just how you feel,” you might instead say something like “That sounds so difficult. Tell me more.” Notice how different the two responses feel.

It is easy to be triggered when someone is describing an experience of abuse or loss. Out of our own anxiety, we may say something unhelpful or damaging. For example, I remember listening to a client tell me about her multiple miscarriages at a time in her life she was experiencing substance abuse and homelessness. I felt my anxiety rising. Instead of responding right away, I allowed myself to breathe and stay present with my client. Pausing and breathing allowed me to resist the urge to say “maybe it’s a blessing” or another cliché. At one point, my client actually said to me “…and if one more person says ‘maybe it’s a blessing” I’m going to strangle them!” Phew – Mindful listening saved the day!

For example, when I was interning as a hospice bereavement counselor, I realized that one of my listening traps is #7 on this list: “Do you get caught up with insignificant facts and details and miss the emotional tone of the conversation?” I became painfully aware of this when I was working with a woman whose son had recently died in a car accident. As she was describing what had happened and the pain of her loss, I interrupted with the question “How old was your son?” This mindless question broke our emotional connection in that moment.

We have all experienced the hurt of not being heard, and being responded to with unwanted advice, a cliché or pat response. Some examples:

“I know just how you feel.”

“Everything happens for a reason.”

“The same thing happened to me.”

“Well, you can always have another [child, pet, relationship – fill in the blank]

“At least he’s in a better place.”

“Maybe you should….”

“It could be worse.”

“Let me tell you about the time when….”

Responding with a cliché does not mean that the listener does not care; it simply means that the listener was not mindful in responding. Mindful listening is like a dance, where most of your attention is focused on the speaker and moments of attention are focused on yourself to make sure you are actually listening. The following are some tips for mindful listening:

Notice your physical and emotional responses as you listen to another’s suffering.

Notice where you feel your tension or anxiety in your body:Is your heart beating faster? Are you feeling tightness in your chest? Fluttering in your stomach?

Take a breath before responding.

Be curious.

Listen not only to the speaker’s words, but also his or her body language and emotional tone.

Remove distractions such as cellphones or paperwork that may prevent you from fully being with the other person.

Pay attention to any judgments that arise and set them aside.

Check in with yourself during the conversation and make sure you are still present and listening.

Sometimes the best response is sacred silence, meeting the other with love and understanding. The key is to be present, breathe, and through your verbal and nonverbal responses, let the speaker know her or she is heard.

Many of my clients come to therapy because they have not been truly heard throughout their lives. Healing begins when the client feels heard by the therapist. When clients have an experience of being heard fully and without judgment by the therapist, they can take the experience of listening and being heard into their lives and experience the sacred space between themselves and others.

Being heard goes hand-in-hand with “active listening.” Wikipedia describes active listening as “a special way of reflecting back what the other person has expressed to let him/her know you are listening…. Active Listening is a restatement of the other person’s communication, both the words and the accompanying feelings, i.e., nonverbal cues—tone of voice, facial expression, body posture.”

Instead of active listening, we often interrupt the speaker with our own ideas or agenda, assume we know what the speaker is going to say and tune them out, get triggered by the depth of what is being said and shut down, or get distracted by our own thoughts.

Active listening involves one’s whole being. It is not just passive silence, but a way of using body, heart and mind to truly hear what the other person is saying and to convey that he or she is being heard. This is done through means such as paraphrasing, reflecting back what you heard, asking questions, maintaining eye contact or nodding your head.

Active listening is a mutual act between the listener and speaker. We listen not only to the words, but also to body language, inflection, tone and other modes of expression. For example, if a friend is telling a story about a great experience visiting family, but her facial expression seems sad, there may be something that is not being expressed in words.

The best instruction I have received for active listening is two words: “Be curious.” Using the example above, the listener might ask “your face looks sad to me when you just told me about your family visit. Is there anything you are sad about?” It takes practice to not assume that you know what is going on and to not judge what you have heard. Asking questions in this way allows both speaker and listener to go deeper and develop closeness and intimacy.

Something sacred happens through active listening and being heard. The Jewish theologian Martin Buber called this the “I and Thou” experience. A sacred space is created between two people when they truly listen and are heard. According to Buber, the ultimate sacred space is that between a person and God. In Buddhism, this can be the experience of our inherent Buddha Nature – the primordial wisdom and purity that exists in all of us at all times, but which we forget as we go through life and start to build defenses against being spontaneously present with ourselves and others.

Only by understanding that we are all in the same boat we call human life can we listen and be heard, with empathy and openness. Instead, we often view those with whom we relate as totally separate from us. We do so to protect ourselves from being seen, or to satisfy some agenda. Buber calls such an interaction “I and It” rather than I and Thou.

The experience of I and Thou can only be sustained when we are fully open and mindful, noticing when we shut down and protect ourselves or when we stop listening to another. Seeing when we shut down can be instructive. It can show us where we are stuck in not wanting to be close and intimate with others. By understanding the triggers that cause us to shut down and protect ourselves, we can develop compassion for ourselves and others and be fully being present with others, without an agenda or guardedness.

I have always found it interesting that the words “heard” and “heart” are so similar. Our wounded hearts can be healed by the mutual experience of listening with our whole body, heart and mind and being heard. We can then experience the sacred space of I and Thou between us. As Zen Buddhist teacher Joan Halifax has said:

Listening means that we have stabilized our minds so completely thatthe person who is speaking can actually hear themselves through our stillness. It is a quality of radiant listening, of luminous listening, of vibrant listening, but it is also very still. It is listening with attention, with openheartedness, without prejudice. We listen with our being. We offer our whole listening body.[1]

How many times has someone said to you “don’t take it personally”? You have probably heard it so many times that the phrase has lost all meaning. Yet, the truth is that almost nothing is truly personal. Further, not taking things personally allows us to experience self-compassion and compassion for others.

We suffer when we believe in a solid sense of “I.” This is the fundamental tenet of the first of the Four Noble Truths in Buddhism. Developing an understanding of this First Noble Truth is the key to the experience of freedom and ease. Believing in the true existence of “I” is commonly referred to in Buddhism as ego-clinging. It can also be called self-importance.

Everything is a Projection

People do not see things in exactly the same way. Rather, what each of us perceives is a projection, based on numerous factors, such as habits, assumptions, culture, values and preferences. In fact, the only things the eye directly sees are colors and shapes.

I often help my clients develop their understanding of projections by looking at a plant in my office. I ask them what they see. They may say they see a pretty philodendron. When we analyze that, we realize that “pretty” is an evaluation and “philodendron” is a label. So, what is seen under the labels and evaluations? All that the eye truly registers on the optic nerve are colors and shapes.

Seeing mere colors and shapes does not satisfy our busy brains. We take the color and shape and add labels, evaluations, stories, and on and on until it becomes an epic novel. For example, from the color and shape, we label the plant and then evaluate it. Unless we are mindful about our proliferating thoughts, we may go on and think about the last time the plant was watered and if it needs pruning. We may even go further and judge ourselves for not having a green thumb.

It is the same when we see another person. We don’t stop with what we see directly. Rather, we go on to project all our own “stuff” on that person: good person, bad person, fat person, fit person, attractive person, unattractive person and on and on. Of course, human connection is far more nuanced than mere colors and shapes. However, an understanding that what another sees is his or her particular projection is helpful when we are feeling judged or criticized. This does not mean that constructive criticism is to be ignored. What we should remember, however, is that it is your behavior that is being critiqued, and not who you actually are.

Not taking things personally as the key to compassion and harmony

Not taking things personally is also a key to effective and responsible communication. When we put aside our ego-clinging and self-importance, we can better hear what another is actually saying. Behind every criticism or judgment is a need that is not being expressed in a compassionate manner. Instead of defending our position and taking what is being said personally, take a breath or two before automatically reacting defensively. Feel what your body is telling you. For example, does that clenching tightness in your gut feel like anger or hurt? When you understand what you are feeling, you can more ably discern how to respond, and even whether to respond at all.

For example, if a partner says, “you never wash the dishes,” what he or she is likely expressing is a request that you do the dishes. A typical kneejerk reaction would be to defend yourself, responding “that’s not true. I washed the dishes last Tuesday.” A defensive reaction such as this is likely to create more tension. Instead, we can respond with compassion, both for what we feel and for what our partner is asking.

If what is being said is intentionally mean or verbally abusive, it may be best to disengage in order to feel safe. Responding defensively may escalate an already difficult situation. By disengaging in those situations, you can best contemplate and choose the best choice of action for yourself under the circumstances.

Not taking things personally may take practice, patience and mindfulness in order to let go of our need to be right or defend our position. The result is a more kind and compassionate relationship, both with ourselves and with others.

We resist the idea of letting go because we tend to equate it with giving up or surrendering to another’s will. When we let go and accept what we are actually feeling and listen to what another is saying, compassion and freedom can arise. In contrast, when we immediately guard or defend ourselves, we cannot hear what another is actually saying. In addition, when we reflexively defend our position, we are dissociating ourselves from our emotions and the truth.

How to Let Go

The first step in letting go is to experience our feelings in a direct, non-judgmental and honest way. The best way to do that is to take a breath and feel your bodily sensations. For example, if someone says something to me that seems judgmental or accusatory, my go-to reflexive response is to immediately defend myself and my position. When that happens, the tension between us escalates, and neither of us truly hears what the other person is saying.

When I am mindful and take a step back before automatically reacting, I can hear both what the other person is asking, and what I am feeling in response. In his book Emotional Rescue: How to Transform Hurt and Confusion into Energy that Empowers You , Dzogchen Ponlop calls this taking a “mindful gap.” Taking a pause rather than immediately reacting allows me to hold the present moment, feel the energy in my body, and look directly at my experience, without creating extraneous thoughts or story lines.

Using the example of someone saying something to me that seems judgmental or accusatory, when I take a mindful step back and observe my bodily sensations, I may feel a tightness in my heart. I breathe into that tightness and find that what I am feeling is hurt and sadness. Then I can get perspective and can choose to respond in a responsible way, hearing the need the other person is expressing rather than my hurt feelings. This does not mean that I give up feeling hurt, but rather, take responsibility for it in a compassionate way. I can then let it go and respond in an empathic and responsible way.

From Emotional Slavery to Emotional Liberation

This process is described by Marshall Rosenberg in his seminal book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life : “We take responsibility for our feelings, rather than blame other people, by acknowledging our own needs, desires, expectations, values and thoughts.” This is the key to compassionate communication and healing our relationships, with ourselves and all others.

The result of taking responsibility in this way is what Rosenberg calls “emotional liberation.” Freedom occurs when we experience and take responsibility for our feelings, understand what another needs and what we need, and make requests that are in accord with our needs. As Bob Marley notes in Redemption Song, when we own our feelings, we can free ourselves from “mental slavery” and let go.